Agile and the DISC Model Combined

 The DISC (Dominance, Influence, Steadiness and Compliance) behaviour model has been around for a long time but I am thinking of combining it with creating teams in Agile to get a better mix of people at the start of a project. Often they are thrown together and there can be clashes and dysfunctional behaviour but this might help us to avoid some obvious mistakes e.g. too many leaders or no leaders and over time to develop a feel for what the best mixture of personality styles for a particular team is.

There are limitations to this approach but if it improves new teams by a slight amount I think it is worth it.

I would provide my own DISC report to the team so they had an idea of strengths, weaknesses etc and they could do the same thing. Otherwise we spend months working it out. It might be an additional expense at the start of a project but the benefit might outweigh the cost by a magnitude. 

My other idea is to have people do this as part of the appraisal process, if they want to, to support any career changes or ideas they want to present to their boss.

Innovation in the 19th & 21st Century - What Would the Mayor of Baden Do?

Around 1887 Karl Benz had created a motor vehicle and driven it around the area. The first thing that the police did was to inform that to drive a mechanical vehicle in the province of Baden was against the law. He explained the future of the horseless vehicle and the precautions he had taken with his employees driving and that any prohibition on the part of the authorities would give other countries a lead in this future industry. He was given permission to drive within the boundaries of the city but to go further he would need the consent of the Minister of Baden.

He contacted the Minister who suggested speed limits of 6kmh (walking pace) within the city and 12kmh (trotting) outside. This was an unnecessary constraint and would've killed the industry in its infancy. 

Benz arranged to demonstrate his vehicle to the Minister and picked him up at Mannheim station. Benz also arranged for a milk cart to pull up alongside during the ride, let him pass and then overtake him. This was rehearsed so it didn't look too staged.  On the day Benz sent his foreman to pick up the Minister with the instruction that the speed limit was not to be exceeded. The milk cart turned up and swished past them, hurling insults and jeering at them as he went by. But even before the Minister had become impatient with the slow progress of the journey.

Once the milk cart had overtaken them the Minister said, as a response to the fact the police forbade them from travelling quicker, "we can't have milk carts passing us, push her along as hard as she will go". The Minister travelled to the factory, had the technology explained to him and was told that no further obstacles, in the form of speed-limits, would stand in his path.

This gave him impetus for further developments of the vehicle. Later at the Imperial Exhibition in Munich he would not be given official permission by the Police to demonstrate his vehicle. However the Police compromised and he was allowed to unofficially drive the car for 2 hours a day in Munich but be responsible for any damage and he was not to plead that he had been given official or unofficial permission.

More than 150 years later technology meets the same challenges as politicians who have more focus on regulation than innovation look to close down and restrict development, particularly in Europe. On the other hand they are clamouring for digitisation and wonder why the EU has not produced a Silicon Valley. 

Alas we do not have politicians with the foresight of the Mayor of Baden and the Police Force of Munich nowadays. Imagine if the EU had existed back then. It would have regulated to protect stables and carriages from the satanic majesty of the combustion engine.

Satanic Technology Through The Ages Reaches AI

 

AI and other tech breakthroughs have been treated with similar suspicion. This applies to the arrival of the printing press, the locomotive and the motor vehicle. 

Below is what happened when Gottfried Benz took his vehicle into town for a drive in the 19th Century. It was the AI breakthrough of its time.

“It was soon apparent to him that not a word about his experiments had reached the ears of those outside Mannheim… It was as though some diabolical engine of the father of evil had suddenly dropped from the clouds; children fled screaming from him to their houses; mothers made a hasty rush for their offspring and pulled them indoors as they did so. A number of the older people, less agile than the others, fell down on their knees as he approached, and made the sign of the cross on their breasts. Horses took fright, and either bolted or performed circus tricks in the middle of the road.  One young man fled in terror in front of him shouting to all at the Devil had come; men repairing the roads threw down their tools and made off across Fields as fast as their legs would carry them. in other villages he passed through, the inhabitants took up an aggressive attitude; large numbers of stones were thrown … 

In many parts of the country it was regarded as something supernatural. Astonishment, terror and hostility were intermixed, for the inhabitants seldom read newspapers and so missed the brief allusions to the new invention which were beginning to appear in the German Press.”

The motor vehicle is one of a long list of overreactions to satanic technologies. For example, “With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon. In all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it’s like – yeah, he’s sure he can control the demon. Doesn’t work out,” said Elon Musk in 2014.  

More recently there was a letter urging for a pause on development signed by tech leaders, professors and researchers in urged artificial intelligence labs to stop the training of the most powerful AI systems for at least six months, citing “profound risks to society and humanity.” 

The motor car provides many new opportunities and changed society. However, it put the horse and cart transport out of business. Should we have demanded a 6-month pause back then?

The Horrible Covid Injection and the nice German Doctor

 Lo and behold I had my 4th injection last week and I am on blood thinners with a bandage around my leg. I had the jab on Tuesday and felt a bit tired on Wednesday. The pain in my leg was there on Thursday after all the fatigue and blurriness had subsided. Obviously, this was some form of muscle cramp as I explained to my wife who works in Drug Safety the following day when the pain had breached a threshold where I would have to tell her.

The pain and swelling in my leg grew and shrank. Sometimes it was hotter and more swollen and sometimes it subsided to a level where I could hobble but at a reasonable pace and not completely inelegantly. 

On Friday the local hospital outpatient thought it was muscular and told me to keep an eye on it and that it was too early for it to be related to the vaccine. 

During this period I had been working but had not been able to walk much as I waited for the pain to die down as I was due to travel to Munich (about 6 hours) to work in the office. On Monday I hobbled to the local GP who compared the two legs with a measuring tape (the Germans like that kind of thing) and declared that I had a thrombosis of the leg and organised a prescription and a blood test.

There are no lessons to be learned but I was pretty healthy before the jab and now I'm not. No Good Deed Goes Unpunished and I am reminded by my wife of how fatal blood clots can be. 

Next week I'll have a check-up and go to Munich as I expect I will be a bit better by then. In the meantime, I am handing over a project to a colleague and I've come up with an art idea that I may be able to do with someone who works locally.

Guglhupf Geschwader at the Cinema in Munich

 I saw my first film at the cinema in Germany yesterday, This is the latest in a series of crime films set in rural Bavaria. These are based on books by a lady called Rita Falk. Both the films and the books deserve to be better known but I would expect that an English or American version would lose some of the humour.

There is a main character the cop who is Bavarian Bruce Willis and his friend Rudi, they comprise 'the Dream Team'. The other family members, colleagues and friends are always involved in the case or cases as there was a serial murderer in an earlier film. Despite the deaths this is a funny film that celebrates rural Bavaria and its manners and customs.

I saw it at the Sendlinger Tor Cinema which is a great venue and the actors and the writer were there to promote it. There is no way I would have been able to enjoy them talking about working on the film (30 days a year and they produced one during the pandemic) and encouraging people to support local bookshops and not Amazon.

This aspect of Germany is such a revelation. Their vibrant film industry and their humour. Guglhupf Geschwader is doing twice the box office of 'Bullet Train' and I am not surprised. There is no hullabaloo about the promotion of this film, no men dressed in skirts to create attention just hard working actors and writers who enjoy what they are doing.

Unexpected Things in the German Language 'KopfKino' and 'Mimik'

 I moved to Germany last year with no job lined up as my wife had an opportunity over there. To get a job and to function well you need to speak and understand German. I continue to learn and I am surprised and fascinated with the culture and activities that Germany has to offer.

One myth is that all the German words are long and there is a shorter English equivalent. In my new job I train people in English who may have English as their 2nd or 3rd language. It's a balance between making the course boring by using too simplistic phrasing or being entertaining and having references they don't understand without explanation. I try and avoid anything that sounds too 'new age' even if I think that the concept works. Often I use the term visualisation to encourage people to share information in pictures or graphs or to rehearse mentally a situation they are going to be involved in. It turns out the Germans have a word kopfkino (head cinema) that does all the work for me and more and is more elegant. Another word I have discovered is Mimik which is German for facial expressions.

Getting past the surface and stereotypes of culture opens up a different game to explore and try out new things. Mark Twain may have complained about the German language but I put that in Mark Twain's nature to tweak the tail of his host country. 

'Hello Kitty' and Alice in Wonderland

 

I watched this today and found it very good. It is simplified for children and I wish it was longer animation than just about 15 minutes. In his lifetime Carroll created a cut-down, children's version of Alice in Wonderland that was intended to be read to and with the child. This fits into the same category but, as an adult, I could appreciate the bits they cut out because they would be boring to young minds and parts they changed. They can always read the book later on but this is visually interesting, funny and challenging. It's a good adaptation and far better than the Pikachu film that my nieces took me to.

This came across my desktop because I had read 'Pure Invention' by Matt Altt which describes how Japanese pop-culture has influenced Western culture. It discusses the impact of films, animation, toys but not music. Music hasn't travelled well. which is strange because they gave us Karaoke. It's a good book for people who are interested in how inventions occur and how they become a fad or something deeper. Sanrio, the makers of 'Hello Kitty' now own the Mister Men which has a similar look and feel to the Hello Kitty culture.